Classical Tyro

A Beginner's Guide to Great Music

It’s official — I have never stayed with a New Year’s Resolution as long as the one I made for 2019 to listen to all the music in Clemency Burton-Hill’s Year of Wonder. February supplied some great pieces, from Gregorio Allegri to Giacomo Puccini to John Williams. I will say, however, that I was generally familiar with the music on the February list and wasn’t introduced to as many new pieces as was true for January. I was nevertheless thrilled to wake up every morning and read about the music Burton-Hill had assigned for each day of the month.

Although I made my resolution at the beginning of January, I see no reason the Year of Wonder can’t begin any day of the year. I recommend followers of this blog purchase Burton-Hill's book and get to work reading about and listening to her terrific recommendations. I have posted a Spotify playlist for March for those who want to begin their own Year of Wonder.

I have also embedded pieces by Percy Grainger and Wolfgang Mozart that ranked as highlights for me in February.

Enjoy!

Spotify Playlist for MARCH of the Year of Wonder

Grainger, Handel in the StrandPerformed by Richard Hickox (piano) and the BBC Philharmonic

Mozart, Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, K. 448Performed by Daniel Barenboim and Margaret Argerich

I have just finished my first month reading through Year of Wonderby Clemency Burton-Hill. The book provides descriptions of 366 pieces of music, one for each day of the year, and I have dutifully kept up with the mission of the book by reading about and listening to one piece of music every day. I have even given several of the pieces repeated listenings and have come to the end of January with an appreciation for many pieces I had never heard. No doubt, this project has turned into one of the better resolutions I have made for a new year, and I look forward to staying with this adventure for the next eleven months. Many thanks to Burton-Hill for her wonderful book.

If anyone would like to join me in this project, you can begin on any day of the year, and I have embedded a Spotify playlist for the music from February. I have also embedded two of the pieces from January that I had never heard and have cheerfully added to my listening repertoire. I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

Maurice Jarre became internationally famous after winning an Acadmey Award for writing the music for Lawrence of Arabia, an original score that the American Film Institute has ranked as the third greatest movie score of all time. Jarre went on to win two more Academy Awards for Dr. Zhivago and Passage to India. Although Jarre is best know for his sweeping orchestral scores, he began working extensivley with electronics in the 1980s to create scores for films such as Witness and Fatal Attraction. I have embedded videos with samples from the scores for all these films below, as well as a sampling of the terrific score for Grand Prix. Many thanks to the students in my "Music in Cinema" class for introducing me to the music for Grand Prix.

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)Perfomed live by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by John Wilson

Here's a recommendation for those who are new to classical music, as well as those who are well-versed in the classical tradition. Find a copy of Year of Wonderby Clemency Burton-Hill and then plan to spend the next year exploring what Leonard Bernstein called the "infinite variety" of classical music. Burton-Hill, has assembled descriptions of a single piece of classical music for each day of the year. Reading what she has written and listening to the pieces she describes takes about 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes at the most.

It's now January 21, and I have almost completed my first month of my "Year of Wonder." In less than a month, Burton-Hill's list has already enriched my life with what I'm beginning to describe as my daily meditation through music. Burton-Hill has also introduced me to a few terrific pieces of music I had never heard (Hildegard's "O Virtus Sapientiae" and Kapsberger's "Toccata L'Arpeggiata," for example).

I have made it my resolution for 2019 to listen to all the music in Burton-Hill’s book. Although I am somewhat knowledgable about classical music, I also know I have much to learn, and Burton-Hill's book has been a godsend.

If you would like to join me in my resolution, I’ll be publishing Spotify playlists created from Burton-Hill's book on this blog for each month of 2019. Stay tuned, and enjoy!

The study of history often takes a back seat to the so-called STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering, and math. Promoting STEM is necessary and worthwhile, and I have stated in a previous blog how we are not misguided in telling a student to “be a scientist and save the world.” I will, however, always be a cheerleader for the importance of students learning history. I will always do what I can to help teachers identify a good reason for teaching history and teaching it well.

Mike Maxwell has addressed the same mission in his informative and thought-provoking book, Future-Focused History Teaching: Restoring the Power of Historical Learning. History teachers searching for a higher purpose for all their hard work should take a look at Maxwell’s book. As someone who has spent over forty years teaching history and training history teachers, I have read much on the topic of history education, and Maxwell’s book is one of the best.

The book is well-researched and chock-full of information about what is currently happening in history education and what we can do to improve what we teach about the past. Maxwell addresses the ubiquitous presence of textbooks in history classrooms and the general inadequacies of those textbooks. He is particularly disturbed by the history classes that focus too much on the memorization of trivia.

In general, Maxwell wants to identify what makes history a useful subject and discuss the urgent need to teach it well. He asks an essential question and then answers it with common sense:

“Is our society better off holding a realistic view of the United States and its role in the world, or is society better off choosing to see only what it wants to see? Democracy is based on the assumption that the people as a whole will exercise better judgment than will a small group of elites. But this assumption is based on the premise that the people have access to a realistic rendering of reality which is primarily dependent on two institutions of democracy that don’t flinch from portraying reality: a free and honest press and a free and honest education.” (142)

In short, we must assume, as George Washington believed, that most people want to do the right thing and will do the right thing if they have good information. Maxwell proposes we provide good historical information by moving away from history curricula based primarily on “knowing” and “remembering." We should not be requiring the memorization of massive amounts of historical information easily find on a smart phone when needed.

Maxwell also does not find the solution in creating history classes designed primarily to help students develop historical thinking skills. In a wise and nuanced explanation of the inadequacies of focusing on teaching historical thinking, Maxwell believes history classes are not really helping students develop any skills that are not already being taught across the curriculum. An emphasis on developing thinking skills does not distinguish the importance of studying history from studying other subjects. Maxwell wants to know what makes history different and why it is so important that students learn history.

In short, Maxwell wants history to be future-focused. He wants students identifying recurring patterns or "principles" of history that might help them in the future when confronted with situations similar to what people confronted in the past. Maxwell cautions history teachers against looking for “rules” or “laws” of history. He wants them looking at patterns that occur over time.

A history teacher might, for example, create lessons around the following principle: “Humans exhibit an instinct to resist external control.” This principle could then be illustrated by examining the Greeks in the fifth century BCE, Joan of Arc in 1428, American colonists in 1776, Toussaint Louveture in 1791, Native Americans at the Little Big Horn River in 1876, Zulus in Natal in 1906, Mahatma Gandhi in the first half of the twentieth century, and the Vietnamese people for the past thousand years.

Maybe, just maybe, students who have examined that principle of history will find the knowledge useful when they became voters debating world affairs. In other words, the history they learned was future-focused. They learned a history designed to help them understand the world better and make more informed decisions about how to shape the world. The history they learned was not composed of memorized facts forgotten soon after serving their purpose on an exam. The history they learned came from a set of well-examined principles identifying patterns in history that will help them throughout their lives.

The College Board currently identifies learning objectives for its history classes that state expectations for student performance. The AP US history curriculum, for example, asks students to “Explain how ideas about democracy, freedom, and individualism found expression in the development of cultural values, political institutions, and American identity.” All told, the objective asks students to know information they can explain. But to what end? Why is it important to know it and explain it? Is it simply an academic exercise, a mind game?

Maxwell’s book gets to the heart of what makes history worthwhile and asks history teachers to reexamine curricula that asks them to teach one thing after another with no eye on the bigger picture, no eye on whether students learn something useful to them in the future.

I suspect most history teachers today are asked to work within a formal curriculum requiring students to know or explain historical information. The curriculum most likely also focuses on developing historical thinking skills. All of these are noble endeavors, but in the end, students need more.

STEM teachers generally have no problem explaining how science, technology, engineering, and math are “future-focused,” how those subjects will be useful in the future. The same is not true for the many teachers who struggle to make history a practical subject for students. For those teachers, I give Maxwell’s book the highest recommendation. He has made a terrific case for creating future-focused history classes. If our educational system adopted his general philosophy, we would have much work to do reaching a consensus about the principles of history we should teach our children. In the end, however, our efforts might not be as difficult as we think and would certainly create a much better answer to the perennial question that plagues history teachers: “Why are we studying this stuff?”

Duke Ellington's Nutcracker Suite works on me like a time machine. I’d call it "nostalgia," but I was only four years old when it was first recorded. At that age I had little knowledge of a world beyond my family and home. I certainly had no awareness of Duke Ellington.

I did not begin listening to Ellington until I was in my twenties, and I should probably be waxing nostalgic about the 1980s when I first fell in love with Ellington's music rather than a time when Eisenhower was president. However, that is not how Ellington's music affects me. It does not take me back to a time in my own life when I first discovered the music's soulful elegance, it takes me to the time of its recording, a time when big band music was an integral part of American culture.

My faux nostalgia therefore comes from a longing for an era when Ellington's music was heard with ears more acclimated to big band music. I yearn to hear Ellington's music as an unalloyed product of its time, to hear it without the iconic adulation that came from a later age. I am envious of those who heard Ellington's music when it was first performed, before it was reshaped by familiarity. How groundbreaking and imaginative it must have sounded when it was new.

In 1965, a music jury voted to make Ellington the first African American and first jazz artist to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. The Pulitzer committee, to its everlasting shame, refused to accept the recommendation and decided not to give an award for music that year rather than recognize Ellington. Not until 1996 was an African-American (George Walker) awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 1997, Wynton Marsalis became the first person to win a Pulitzer for composing jazz.“Critics have their purposes, and they're supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did. – Duke Ellington

I know nothing about Herbie Mann as a human being. I know only his music.

His recordings tell me nothing about his family, personal temperament, or worldview. They inform me only of his skills as a musician — his ability to improvise and perform in sync with other musicians, his ability to remain true to the harmonic progressions that underscored his solos and the syncopated rhythms that propelled him forward. The recordings tell me nothing about whether he was a great guy or a rascal, and I don’t really care. His music makes me smile, and that's enough.

Herbie Mann died in 2003 at his home in Pecos, NM. His music has brought me great joy over the years, and I still mourn his loss.

Bless you, Herbie Mann. Whether you were a saint, a demon, or just a regular guy, may you rest in peace. As a jazz musician, you were, for this former flute player, a demigod.

The ubiquitous presence of Carl Orff’s “O Fortuna” in movies, television shows, and even commercials makes it difficult to imagine that someone has never heard it. Although it might sound a little spooky or devilish, it is actually part of a larger piece of music based on a collection of twelfth-century poems about the pleasures of love, nature, and alcohol. The piece is titled Carmina Burana (Songs of Beuern), and “O Fortuna serves as an introduction and coda to the piece.

Here’s the lyrics to “O Fortuna" to follow as you listen to the video below. I have also embedded a playlist of Carmina Burana in its entirety.

Edvard Grieg stood only five feet tall and composed music while sitting on copies of Beethoven’s piano sonatas so he could reach the keyboard. His diminutive size, however, did not keep him from writing titanic music, as evident in his Piano Concerto in A minor. Except for the Peer Gynt Suite, the piano concerto is probably Grieg’s most well-known composition—and it’s a beaut. The great Franz Liszt performed it in Rome and made recommendations to Grieg for revising the score. Grieg responded by telling Liszt that he had performed the first movement too fast.

Grieg died on September 4, 1907, and his ashes were interred outside his home in Bergen, Norway. I took the photo below of Grieg's gravesite three years ago when I had the wonderful opportunity to tour his home.

I often find legends and myths about Billy the Kid more fascinating than factual narratives. So little is actually known about William H. Bonney, that I read most histories of his life with a suspicious mind, and the novels, television shows, and movies are sometimes more interesting than the history books.

Someone with a creative mind might, for example, begin with these lines from Woody Guthrie's song "Billy the Kid" and tell a complicated and transfixing story.

There's many a man with a face fine and fairWho starts out in life with a chance to be square,But just like poor Billy he wanders astrayAnd loses his life in the very same way.

Someone might even take these lines from the "The Seven-Year-Old Poet" by Arthur Rimbaud, a French writer who most likely never heard of William H. Bonney, and create a new and compelling myth of the Kid's life.

And so the Mother, shutting up the duty book, Went, proud and satisfied. She did not see the look In the blue eyes, or how with secret loathing wild, Beneath the prominent brow, a soul raged in her child.

In short, long after all of us who are alive today are gone, people will still be telling stories about Billy the Kid.

The lyric quoted above is not used in this version of Woody Guthrie's song.

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